The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 84: Crash Landing

Chapter 84: Crash Landing

The world quivered and writhed, dark in the way that oil is dark.

Dark in the way that the outside of the universe is dark, ravenously empty, as it waits for the light.

Shimmering with the un-light of places and times and sensations. Sparkling black on black where for just a moment the darkness imagined that it was full.

A layered, clinging dark.

A living darkness, so wrapped and twisted upon itself and everything that the calm of nothingness would have seemed a paradise compared to the chaos.

It was not an evil darkness. Nor a good.

A darkness that simply was... in between the places that were.

Kir was like light, trapped in the sheen of ancient blood. The blood of realities, pulsing and twisting, each its own heart and its own cell.

Its own mouth.

Each a universe of grinding, gnashing, shredding teeth like shards of crystal splitting and drenching and masticating nothing into endless finite somethings.

And just as violently disgorging their ends into nothingness.

There was nothing to be seen, for indeed sight alone was nothing compared to the pure being of wrathful, lustful, fearful, ecstatically painful existing in the place that was no place.

But after a mote of eternity, Kir fell from nothingness, his precious familiar held against his chest, into somewhere.

Somewhere deep.

Somewhere where down meant something. A smooth, featureless stone floor.

First, he breathed. The breath that filled him was thick with mana. A cloying, hateful haze that filled his lungs and his soul beyond the ability to be used by such a frail body. But yet it gave him strength.

Second, he pulled the sword from where it pierced him. Felt the breath in his body seize from the suckling hole in his lung. Felt the crawl of non-feeling that was the automatic taking care of the cognitive. The numbing adrenaline that bought him time to think.

He spit blood. Leaked blood. Felt the heat of blood as it poured onto the floor.

But there was something else.

"Hey kid."

It was the strange voice.

A many-layered one, and one he’d last heard what felt like ages ago; when he’d passed out from the pain of growing his wings and the battle with his father.

This time, oddly, he felt a sense of direction to it. Like the voice was in front of him. The feminine quality of the voice seemed even more emphatic now, but he could have just been imagining it because of the sense of volume.

When he looked down, he saw the wound in his chest. Felt the blood trickling down his ribs in rivulets.

"You again," Kir said, remembering. "I guess I wasn’t so much of a godling..."

The voice laughed. A harmonious, cacophonous sound. "You’re not dead yet. Just close to it. Closer than the last time, at any rate. Or is it the next time? Time is strange here, hard to recognize when it exists. But as I was saying, I should know. I am dead after all."

"Who are you?" Kir asked.

"Ah, so it’s that time, I think, little godling, you don’t have time for questions. So let me speak first. Then I will ask you a question and you may ask me one. With the time we have."

Kir almost interrupted right there, but he seemed to have only one question, and he wasn’t going to waste it, not when there was someone that needed him. Not when he didn’t know what was going on.

They pretended to clear a throat they didn’t have.

"As I think I was saying the last time, we have a bargain. I’ll help you fix what you broke, and you’ll help me. A fair exchange, isn’t it, lover-boy?" The voice chuckled. Or was it a giggle? "That was a rhetorical question, so don’t answer that." They pretended to clear their non-existent throat again. "I need to establish where we are in all this... The numbers don’t lie, but words do. The numbers don’t but words do. Words pejorate. Numbers only go up and down but the words are going sideways! So I guess the question I must ask is: Do you know your name yet?"

Kir was taken aback. Why kind of question was that?

"It’s Kir," he said.

"Hmm... you’re three-eighths right. Which is right for this time. But you are also five-eighths wrong... or is it eight-elevenths now? Wait, your new last name is ’Gale’, I think. That would mean eight-fifteenths? But then there’s the overlap... Eleven fifteenths? Names are hard right now. I know I told her your old name when I was... am going to? Gah, you’re here, you’re Kir, so that’s already happened. Wings! You got your wings. Time is so unreliable... isn’t it, lover? I showed her how time works. How it twists and never quite manages to bite itself in the ass because there are as many heads as tails and it’s a coinflip, a never-ending coinflip what happens... And she’s trying to cheat. Picking the worlds where everything is tails."

The darkness around them shook.

"I guess that means it’s your turn. Ask away, little godling. Little Kir. One question. The madness won’t let me think on more than one question..."

"Stella... my familiar is sick-"

"Dying would be more accurate," the voice interrupted. "Just like you! Terrible thing, an uncontrolled mana overcharge. Poisoning, people call it. You’ve got it too. Buuuut in your case, that’s just part of the process. You’ll have needed it eventually anyway. To grow. Or explode, whichever you prefer. Explosive growth? A nice long tailssssszah."

"How do I save her?" Kir asked.

The presence before Kir seemed to quirk. "This again? Or wait... tails. Ha-Ah. The answer to that is simple. Just fill her with the mana she can eat after draining the mana she can’t. Terrible thing your father did to her, restricting her diet like that. You’ll need her. But we already discussed that. Wait. No we didn’t. Where was I? Oh yes; one good evolution should fix it... or at least broaden her diet. No need for a niche at a buffet, eh? Dungeons are like that. Buffets. Terrible things. Wasteful. Bad for hygiene. Fuck, I wish I had hygiene. You should cherish your body more... but you need the stress. That’s how it grows. You won’t do the other way."

"I can’t drain mana!" Kir said as the sense of shaking grew stronger.

"Of course you can." The voice was growing more distant as they spoke. "You’re her familiar as much as she is yours. And you’ve got that incubus blood going for you. Oh, but that might wake up too... Unusual attractions. All the heads coming up tails. Just do what you normally do but backward!"

"What?"

"Feed her! But do the opposite first. You’ll be fine! Your bio-mom has it covered. Unless this is one of those times you weren’t fine... Times? Oh wait, you’re close to dead again. I forgot. Man, having a hippocampus would be really convenient right about now... We met on campus you know. I called you "tree boy" because you were so tall, hehe, it was a good name. And when you told me you were tra-."

A sound, of tiny metal bouncing upon the floor.

A single seal undone, one of four.

And a burst of light. A spell wrought just for this moment unleashed.

His body healed.

His broken wing pulled itself together in the no-space bound to his back.

He coughed again.

Blood, again, but no more.

Pain, again, but less.

He had returned from the brink of death, though far from healed completely.

He lay his familiar aside, rolling through the pain to brace above her.

Stella’s breathing was shallow. Kir closed and reopened his eyes, looking at her mana. Her aura was barely there. It seemed to now have gaps in it, and the glow of mana inside her pulsed with every breath. It seemed more solid, and gave Kir a sense of strain, like too much water in a balloon.

"Stella, I need to drain you. May I?" he tried, to see how lucid she was.

She didn’t seem to hear him, there was no answer.

"Please excuse the kiss..." Kir said, only slightly embarrassed as he at first tried concentrating mana at his lips, before reversing the process, focusing hard to circulate his mana away from them. The excess mana inside him made the process more of a struggle, and a bit painful.

He kissed her, twitching a bit as her bat fur tickled his nose. Once the process took, the mana entering him became heady. Rich but unrefined, like he was drinking a mass of flavorless syrup.

Through his lips, he felt Stella start to stabilize. Her breathing deepened.

He realized he was near the end of the intrusive mana when the "flavor" changed. Becoming more refined. Still tasteless, but that was Stella sometimes. It was a pleasurable sensation, one that resonated with something inside him. He could feel some of the intrusive mana convert into something very similar to what he typically felt from Stella.

"Kir?" he heard. "Kir!"

Suddenly there was a sense of mass as his face was violently forced away.

Stella had returned to her demon form. Yet instead of a healthy demonic red, the harsh light of the room and her illness left her looking pinker. Her bat-like wings folded on her back and her horns jutted through her red-streaked, black hair.

"What’s happening? Where are we?" she asked. "Why am I so... thirsty?"

"We fell inside a dungeon... hit the room barrier. I have no idea where we are." He withdrew as Stella’s stomach growled fiercely. As soon as he started to move, however, something inside him began to hurt.

He looked down. In mana-sight, he could now see that his mana was absolutely strained beyond his normal maximum. He wanted to compress it, but there was no way he could with his insides feeling like they were being stabbed by flaming knives every time he shifted.

"Just breathing here makes me feel sick," Stella said.

Kir suddenly remembered what the mysterious voice had said. "Stella, you need to drain me. If you fill yourself with a type of mana your body can handle, I think... that will help you resist the dungeon."

"What?!" Stella shrieked.